Family
and friends of Dafna Meir at her funeral in Jerusalem on January 18, 2106. Meir
was stabbed to death at the entrance to her home in the settlement of Otniel on
January 17. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Stop the incitement, stop the killing. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, January 26, 2016.Horovitz:Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has taken to giving press conferences to
Israeli journalists of late. A picture of wounded innocence and goodwill, he
has been using the opportunities to berate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
for refusing to meet and talk peace with him, highlighting his forces’ ongoing
security cooperation with Israel in the territories, and trying to wriggle out
of his own personal role in fostering the vicious incitement against Israel
that lies at the root of this ongoing Palestinian terror wave.

About
to turn 81, Abbas may not be in politics that much longer, and there are plenty
of Israelis who argue that we are missing an opportunity to make progress with
him when it is clear that any successor is likely to be still more impossible
to deal with.

His
successor may indeed well be worse, but Abbas is impossible. His duplicitous
terrorism-fostering predecessor Yasser Arafat assured the Palestinians that
they had no reason or need to compromise with the Jews because we were colonial
invaders, an unrooted and temporary presence that his people’s stubbornness and
terrorism would eventually see off. Abbas chose not to counter that narrative,
not to acknowledge to his people the Jews’ history of sovereignty in the Holy
Land, and more recently intensified the strategic campaign of misrepresentation
— telling Palestinians that the Jews have no business at the Temple Mount.

Meanwhile,
the Fatah hierarchy he heads has been openly encouraging attacks on Israelis,
and the Hamas terror group with which he seeks to partner in government is
again plotting suicide bombings, developing more sophisticated rockets, and
digging tunnels under the Gaza-Israel border ahead of its next planned war.

Abbas
may well be deploying his forces to keep a lid on clashes in the West Bank, but
he’s presiding over an ongoing, strategic demonizing of Israel and Israelis —
via his education system, political and spiritual leadership and mainstream and
social media — that positively guarantees Palestinian violence and terrorism.
So effective is this process that, nowadays, when a young Palestinian has a row
at home, feels depressed, or wants to make a name for him or herself, the
default response is to grab a knife and go kill the nearest vulnerable Jew.

Israel
paid for Abbas’s last ostensible readiness for peace talks, in 2013-14, with
the release of dozens of killers and other Palestinian terrorists from our
jails. Prior to that, in 2008, Abbas spurned Ehud Olmert’s extraordinary
readiness to give him everything he purportedly sought: We were gone from Gaza,
and Olmert offered to leave the West Bank — with one-for-one land swaps — and
to divide Jerusalem, including relinquishing sovereignty in the Old City. If
that wasn’t good enough for Abbas, then obviously nothing we can offer will be.

While
the United States and much of the international community refuse to internalize
this, the simple, bleak fact is that everything Arafat, Abbas and Hamas have
done since the collapse of the Bill Clinton-hosted Camp David 2000 attempt at
forging a deal has persuaded Israelis that they dare not relinquish territory
to the Palestinians, despite the imperative to separate in order to maintain a
Jewish, democratic Israel.

Arafat
returned from the United States and fostered the Second Intifada’s onslaught of
suicide bombings — attacks throughout Israel that murderously demonstrated that
it was not merely the territories that the Palestinians sought. That it’s not
just the settlements, it’s all of Israel that is rejected.

In the
years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the rocket fire intensified, the
Palestinians gave Hamas a parliamentary majority in elections, and Hamas ousted
Abbas’s forces from the Strip in hours — underlining to Israelis the dangers of
leaving adjacent territory, and the ease with which Islamist forces could seize
power in any vacuum. The latest Israel-Hamas conflict, in 2014, only
re-emphasized the danger: If a single rocket fired by Hamas that got through
the Iron Dome defenses and landed a mile from Ben-Gurion Airport could send
two-thirds of foreign airlines fleeing from Israel, including all the American
carriers, how could Israel possibly entertain the idea of leaving the West
Bank? Hamas would be running the show within days, and our entire country would
be paralyzed and isolated.

The
irony, of course, is that if the Palestinians had been capable of hiding their
hatred for just a short period after we left Gaza, if they had managed to
pretend for even a brief time that their hearts were set on peaceful
coexistence, we probably would have withdrawn unilaterally from much of the
West Bank as well.

Instead,
Palestinian words and deeds have persuaded mainstream Israelis — those who
don’t want to rule the Palestinians, don’t want to expand settlements in areas
we do not envisage retaining under any permanent accord, don’t want to have to
live by the sword forever — that no partnership is viable at present. They’ve
even managed to kill off the optimism of the leader of the Israeli opposition,
Isaac Herzog, who sadly concluded last week that a two-state solution is simply
unrealistic: He “yearns” for it, said Herzog in a radio interview. But it’s
“not possible” right now.

A grassroots approach

So,
how, then, to break out of this awful new reality — of more Palestinian
generations strategically brainwashed to hate, and a bleeding Israel unable to
advance its own interest in a safe separation to guarantee the maintenance of
our Jewish democracy?

Self-evidently,
there will no accord with Mahmoud Abbas. But one thing that Abbas has been
saying at his recent press conferences is worth picking up on. Previous peace
efforts created a joint mechanism intended to combat incitement on both sides,
and Abbas has pronounced himself ready to revive that mechanism. Israel should
take him up on that right away.

Netanyahu
has rightly focused on incitement as a root cause of the current terror wave.
We all have an interest in utilizing any and every tool that just might help
alleviate some of the hostility.

It was
lousy politics of Herzog to publicly give up for now on the two-state solution.
If peace is not on the horizon, after all, why would Israelis elect a leader
who is now acknowledging that his whole prior strategy was misguided? But
Herzog’s sad and sober conclusion underlines that there can and will be no
quick fixes.

What’s
needed, what has always been needed, to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
is a grassroots approach to peacemaking. An approach focused on education. An
approach under which international resources and leverage are utilized to
rewrite educational curricula, to marginalize extremist political and spiritual
leaders, to promote moderation and peaceful interaction.

The
Arafat-Abbas-Hamas strategy of hostility to Israel achieves the precise
opposite of what the Palestinians purport to seek — independent statehood. It
has now even managed to persuade the center-left opposition, the peacemaking
Labor Party, that Israeli readiness for compromise is insufficient.

Perhaps
the international community — so insistently led by US President Barack Obama
in seeking to persuade Israelis that they can afford to take risks for peace
when the bloody evidence all around them shows the contrary — will learn
Herzog’s lesson.

Perhaps
it will move to adopt the grassroots approach.

Perhaps
it will use its immense leverage to gradually help create a climate in which it
is not the most natural thing in the world for teenage Palestinians to set out
with knives and kill Israeli mothers of six and 23-year-old industrial design
graduates.

I agree
with his message of fairness and I share his outrage over inequality and
corporate abuses. I think his righteous populism has captured the moment
perfectly. I respect the uplifting campaign he has run. I admire his
authenticity.

And I
am convinced Democrats would be insane to nominate him.

Hillary
Clinton, by contrast, is a dreary candidate. She has, again, failed to connect
with voters. Her policy positions are cautious and uninspiring. Her reflexive
secrecy causes a whiff of scandal to follow her everywhere. She seems
calculating and phony.

And yet
if Democrats hope to hold the presidency in November, they’ll need to hold
their noses and nominate Clinton.

Ultimately,
I expect that’s what Democrats will do — because as much as they love Sanders ,
they loathe Donald Trump more. It seems more evident each day that Republicans
have lost their collective reason and are beginning to accept the notion that
Trump will be their nominee. And I doubt Democrats will make an anti-immigrant
bigot the president by nominating a socialist to run against him.

Sanders
and his supporters boast of polls showing him, on average, matching up slightly better against Trump than Clinton does. But those matchups are misleading:
Opponents have been attacking and defining Clinton for a quarter- century, but
nobody has really gone to work yet on demonizing Sanders.

The
first questioner from the audience asked Sanders to explain why he embraces the
“socialist” label and requested that Sanders define it “so that it doesn’t
concern the rest of us citizens.”

Sanders,
explaining that much of what he proposes is happening in Scandinavia and
Germany (a concept that itself alarms Americans who don’t want to be like
socialized Europe), answered vaguely: “Creating a government that works for all
of us, not just a handful of people on the top — that’s my definition of
democratic socialism.”

But
that’s not how Republicans will define socialism — and they’ll have the
dictionary on their side. They’ll portray Sanders as one who wants the
government to own and control major industries and the means of production and
distribution of goods. They’ll say he wants to take away private property. That
wouldn’t be fair, but it would be easy. Socialists don’t win national elections
in the United States .

Sanders
on Monday night also admitted he would seek massive tax increases — “one of the
biggest tax hikes in history,” as moderator Chris Cuomo put it — to expand
Medicare to all. Sanders, this time making a comparison with Britain and
France, allowed that “hypothetically, you’re going to pay $5,000 more in
taxes,” and declared, “We will raise taxes, yes we will.” He said this would
be offset by lower health-insurance premiums and protested that “it’s demagogic
to say, oh, you’re paying more in taxes.”

Well,
yes — and Trump is a demagogue.

Sanders
also made clear he would be happy to identify Democrats as the party of big
government and of wealth redistribution. When Cuomo said Sanders seemed to be
saying he would grow government “bigger than ever,” Sanders didn’t quarrel,
saying, “P eople want to criticize me, okay,” and “F ine, if that’s the
criticism, I accept it.”

Sanders
accepts it, but are Democrats ready to accept ownership of socialism, massive
tax increases and a dramatic expansion of government? If so, they will lose.

Michael
Bloomberg, the billionaire and former New York mayor who floated a trial balloon over the weekend about an independent run, knows this. As the New York
Timesreported: “If Republicans were to nominate Mr. Trump or Senator Ted Cruz,
a hard-line conservative, and Democrats chose Mr. Sanders, Mr. Bloomberg ... has
told allies he would be likely to run.”

President
Obama seems to know this, too — which would explain why he tiptoed beyond his
official neutrality to praise Clinton in an interview with Politico’s Glenn
Thrush. “I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating
values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of
politics,” he said. He portrayed Sanders as “the bright, shiny object that
people haven’t seen before.”

It
doesn’t speak well of Clinton that, next to her, a 74-year-old guy who has been
in politics for four decades is a bright and shiny object. The #feelthebern
phenomenon has at least as much to do with Clinton as with Sanders: Democrats
are eager for an alternative to her inauthentic politics and cautious policies.

I share
their frustration with Clinton. But that doesn’t make Sanders a rational
choice.

Among
the responses in Israel to the Paris Terror Attacks, there has emerged a divide
that deserves attention. Depending on where you spend your political time, one
or the other response will appear predictable (and lamentable).

First,
there are the self-referential Zionists who think, as they did after the
attacks of Sept. 11 and the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and so many other
moments: “Now, maybe they’ll understand our plight, and realize we have the
same enemies,” and “We Israelis have a lot to teach you.” Their battle-hardened
cousins further to the right reply, “Don’t bother trying, they’re all
anti-Semitic and judge us by a double standard” or even “The West deserves what
they’re getting, as a punishment for their hypocrisy.”

On the
other hand, we have those who see this entire range of responses as
distasteful, to say the least. Instead, they urge an expression of sympathy and
solidarity unclouded by words of reproach, by displaying the French flag online
as a way to declare #JeSuisFrançais. It’s really not cool for Israelis to
complain about a double standard at a time like this, they scold. It’s not
about us—it’s about France. As for those people, like the prime minister, who
compare ISIS to Palestinian terrorists, they are engaging in a low form of propaganda, trying to use the victims of other wars in other places to wash
away the sins of Israeli occupation.

In a
deeply disturbing and repeating 21st-century, paradox, however, the approach of
Israel’s generous and selfless ones has worked to the benefit of most
regressive forces on the planet—while on the contrary, the voice that awakening
Europe needs most to heed in the current crisis is that of those self-centered
Israelis who relate European woes to their own pain. The failure to understand this
paradox explains both why Western elites are so poor at resisting global jihad,
and why, for a disaffected youth—Muslim by birth or by choice—it makes sense to
join that jihad. Indeed, this split in Israeli discourse about the Paris
attacks illustrates the disproportionate impact of a peculiar Jewish dispute on
the current cognitive disorientation of the West.

But
first, let’s explain our terms. Let’s call the first response the tribalist approach. It is centered on the self, preoccupied with defending family, clan,
group; suspicious by default of others, especially of strangers; and easily
rendered defensive by threatening behavior. Tribalists think in terms of “us
vs. them”; they treat “their own” differently from others, and when they feel
sufficiently threatened, they will lash out. They think of their own pain and
feel anger at hypocrisy (in this case against the French for their 15-year-long
indifference to the pain of their Jews). This mindset historically favors
vengeful attitudes—“they deserve it”—and rough justice.

Politically,
these folks appear on the “right” of our spectrum, and they remind us of
historical periods when people with power lacked empathy and used it cruelly, a
political culture of rule or be ruled,
that democracies hope to have outgrown. Tribalists are the zero-sum folks: “I
only win if they lose,” and, “they only understand force.” Like Huntington, one
of their intellectual heroes, these tribalists tend to look for enemies. They find reasons to be belligerent, to provoke
war, they “invent the enemy.”

Let’s
call the second response the universalist: considerate of others,
self-abnegating: “This is not about
Israel.” These are the positive-sum folks, the ones who make friends, who build
on trust, who come up with mutually beneficial projects from which everyone
profits, who look for the voluntary win-win
rather than the coerced win-lose.
They reject the selfish me first, the
invidious us-them, the tribal my side right or wrong.

These
folks appear on the “left” of our political spectrum. They empathize with the
“other” and embrace diversity. They can and want to trust. In renouncing the win-lose, they become capable of
granting dignity and freedom to others—the fundamental social contract of a
successful egalitarian culture. They imagine themselves as inhabitants of a
future diverse, civil, and peaceful global community, where racism and
xenophobia are no more.

This
dichotomy between tribal and universal sheds light on the current paradoxical
situation in Europe, where the most extraordinary cognitive disarray rules.
Specifically, when it comes to judging Israel’s conflict with its neighbors,
Europeans have inverted vision. And the ensuing radical cognitive
disorientation contributes to a fatal misreading of the forces Europeans themselves
face.

By and
large, the European elites—journalists, academics, policy pundits, political
class—are members of the universalist camp. In their reading, Israelis are the
zero-sum players. They deserve the
hostility of their neighbors; they have brought upon themselves the suicide bombings, the intifadas, and the deep
hatreds. They have done so with their settlements and occupation and
humiliating checkpoints and periodic bombing raids that kill hundreds of
children and thousands of innocent civilians.

They
think the Israelis are the tribal
players here, needlessly but persistently humiliating their poor Palestinian
victims; that if Israel stopped constantly frustrating Palestinian aspirations
with their insistence on ruling over them and rather made noble gestures,
Israel would take a dramatic step toward that peace and make the world a better
place for all. Its refusal to so act, proves
that Israel is the greatest obstacle to peace, the great provoker of
Palestinian grievance. However lamentable, Palestinian hostility comes from an
understandable reaction to what
Israel does to them.

Many a
prominent Israeli, especially among their cultural elites, shares this view.
They embrace and promote the story frame of the Israeli Goliath crushing the poor Palestinian David. For them, the conflict with the Palestinians has nothing to do with the jihadi attacks on
the West, and it’s offensive for Israelis to complain about not being included
among the victims of terrorism. They believe that Palestinians have limited,
national goals, and that once Israelis stopped being so awful, Palestinians
would stop hating them. They fervently hold that this conflict is not a religious war about eliminating
the Jews from the Waqf—holy trust—that goes from the river to the sea.

In
order to think this way, of course, one has to ignore a lot of important data,
especially what Muslims say to each other. And yet, despite its immediate
relevance to the European predicament, both Europeans, and many Israeli
intellectuals, insist on ignoring the basic terms of jihadi discourse. Like
those who say, “ISIS is not Islamic,” they turn a deaf ear to a discourse that
is not theirs.

***

To
universalists who wish to understand just what kind of peril they—and their
universal values—are in, I would suggest that they might pay attention to the
unmistakable voices of the hardest of
zero-sum thinking among Israel’s declared enemies. Here you find the
regressive, drive for “our” domination and “your” subjection, of gaining honor
from debasing the “other.” At their worst, such voices demonize and dehumanize
(devil, apes, and pigs). They appeal to the most megalomanic hopes and paranoid
fears of their audiences. They cultivate an irredentist hatred of the “other.”
And such voices permeate the discourse of Palestinian hatred of Israel.

Now
compare the tribal and religious hatreds that target Israel with those that
move the jihadis who attacked Parisian nightlife this month, the United States
on Sept. 11, Barcelona, London, and who knows how many more places. How
different are they? Here we find the same raging sense of victimhood, the same
call to pre-emptive vengeance, arising from a firm conviction that one’s very
self is under attack, the belief that, if “we” do not exterminate our foe,
“they” will exterminate “us.” Here we find the same wanton attitude toward
human life, even one’s own: Muslim kills Muslim to kill infidels; Hamas kills
Gazans to rocket Israel.

At its
most intense, we find in both places, apocalyptic believers for whom the
current conflict is both existential and cosmic. They engage in a pitiless war
on evil, in which the enemy must be wiped out or subjected, lest “they,” by
their malevolent existence, destroy “our” faith. If you want to touch the gold
standard of genuine xenophobia, paranoia, and genocidal hatreds, listen to what
apocalyptic Muslims say about the infidel.

In
France, the motto is “padamalgam”: Don’t lump the vast majority of innocent and
peaceful Muslims with the tiny minority of crazies who have hijacked their
religion. But that move falls into the equally problematic amalgam of all nonviolent Muslims as moderates. Indeed, here’s the
problem. The amalgam, “the vast majority of nonviolent Muslims,” actually spans
a great gamut of Muslim religiosities, from those ready to live side-by-side in
tolerance and peace with non-Muslims, to enthusiastic but not public supporters
of the jihadis.

The key
to distinguishing within this “vast majority” between genuine moderates and
covert jihadis is to identify what one might call “triumphalist” Islam.

If
“religiosity” represents a way of “living” one’s religion, triumphalism
represents that form of religiosity that needs to assert visible dominance in
order to prove the validity of its claims about God and especially claims to
being God’s favorite. Many a patristic theologian argued that the “Conversion of the Roman Empire” proved the superiority of Christianity over paganism,
philosophy, and Judaism. The use of power to impose religious truth—crusades
and inquisition, permitted by this “triumph,” was not undone until the American
Constitution when, for the first time in Christian history, tolerance was a winner’s creed.

Europeans
who bother to inform themselves about their and Israel’s enemies will find the
same zealous hatred of infidels, the same misogynistic fear of difference, of
otherness, of dissent, of contradiction, a fear of the very possibility of humiliation at the hands
of someone who should be inferior, like women and infidels, the same deep
discomfort at the very thought of equal treatment for infidels and the
faithful.

They
will find the same shrill insistence on a triumphalist Islam that proves the
truth of its claims to superiority over all other faiths, by dominating and
subjecting recalcitrant infidels, by humiliating, and, where necessary
exterminating those who threaten their superiority.

The
hatred these triumphalist Muslims feel for the “Zionist Entity” comes not from
Israel’s unwillingness to compromise, not because of settlements and occupation
since ’67, but because any territory in Dar al Islam where infidels have
sovereignty, constitutes an unbearable blasphemy. And triumphalist Muslims,
everywhere, share this hostility to autonomous infidels, the contempt, the
desire to spread dar al Islam to hold dominion, to raise up a triumphant Islam
by debasing and subjecting the West.

This
triumphalism explains why Israel is a peculiar variant on the more extensive
jihadi hostility to infidels. Most threatening of all to this kind of
religiosity, tiny Israel’s ability to resist being obliterated constitutes the
supreme modern sacrilege to the triumphalist’s notion of Allah. Triumphalist
Muslims, humiliated more generally by the modern success of infidels since Napoleon, have experienced repeated humiliation since 1948 by Israel and the
United States. In their mind, global jihad means that, at last, now, is the time for the apocalyptic hadith enshrined in the Hamas charter, about a final war of extermination on
the Jews, when the Jews will flee and hide, and the rocks and trees will call
out to Muslims to denounce the Jew hiding behind them. And although that particular hadith does not go on to
discuss what happens next, the larger apocalyptic scenario sees the elimination
of the Jews as a prelude to subjugating the rest of the infidels.

From
this critical perspective, ISIS and Hamas are part of the same jihad against
the West—maybe differing in their stage of development, their circumstances,
their leadership, their life-destroying strategies, but essentially the same in
their triumphalist belief in Islam’s destiny to rule the earth, and their role
in violently bringing about that destiny. They share a hatred and contempt for
infidels of all kinds—dhimmi, apostates, blasphemers, pagans, ignoramuses. They
share the same paranoia, the same sense of victimization, the same sense of
existential threat, the same sense that they defend the true faith by taking
vengeance on those who mock the Prophet.

People
who insist that Hamas and ISIS have nothing to do with each other give global
jihad an enormous boon: They disguise Hamas by presenting it as a movement for
national liberation even as it fans the flames of global jihad. In so doing,
many Westerners think they help the Palestinian cause, when in fact they
empower a leadership that willingly sacrifices ordinary Palestinians to advance
its cause, and at the same time, empower the global jihadis by running their Palestinian propaganda as news, and reinforcing a collective sense of
victimization. Instead of recoiling from the horror, the more demented—but sincere—Western “progressives” shout “We are Hamas.” And those Israelis who
rush to assure the global community that people who argue, as I have above, are
just trying to hide their own crimes against the Palestinians, effectively
blind those who listen to their counsel to a shared foe of all decent
people—Muslim, Jew, Christian, and secular, alike.

***

When
Western Europeans opened their gates to receive a rapid influx of hundreds of
thousands even millions of Muslims fleeing the madness that ruled in their
homelands, it stunned those of us who see Islamic radicalism as a real and
global threat. Who, knowing the cultural and demographic dynamics, would
imagine that Europe would throw its gates open to a massive wave of largely
male Muslim immigration? How many of these newcomers, who made it into Europe
undocumented, would, we thought, immediately disappear into those
“non-existent” no-go zones and provide a powerful reinforcement to the jihadi
presence already there? How many more, stuck in refugee camps, would offer a
perfect recruiting ground for the caliphate? Indeed, among other things, the
recent attack in Paris reflects how much these reinforcements have increased
their confidence. As more and more people realize, this massive influx of newcomers—refugees,
migrants, jihadis—is a catastrophe for civil society in Western Europe.

And
yet, far from thinking they were committing cultural suicide, the Europeans
perceived themselves as saving their humanity, their commitment to universalist
values, their compassion. In their minds they were giving succor to a wave of
desperate refugees, showing their universalist values (and atoning for the Holocaust). In this they were systematically encouraged, not only by the news media but also by their elected officials. All these players resonated to the
progressive and redemptive call to make a grand and compassionate gesture that
could transform hostile relations with Muslims into peaceful ones. The
Universalists, unaware of whom they dealt with, welcomed into their safe
spaces, tribalist enemies.

Earlier
this month I was slated to speak on a panel sponsored by a Member of Parliament
in the House of Commons on the BBC. After the public announcement, Ben White,
an activist journalist, published a piece on how an MP was about to appear on a
panel with a known Eurabian conspiracy thinker: Me. His major proof was a
remark I made in 2007 at a Herzilya Conference:

European
democratic civilization can fall before the Islamic challenge. Do not say that
this will never happen in Europe and that Islam will not be able to take
control of Europe. If Europe continues its current path, the fall will be
sooner.

This
remark, amply supported by events during the following eight years, and which
today I would only amend by adding “triumphalist” to modify “Islamic
challenge,” was sufficient to frighten a pro-Israel MP into bumping me from the
panel. White’s article had caused him “considerable embarrassment,” he noted in
explanation for his decision. One thinks fondly of A Fish Called Wanda, in which Archie (John Cleese) describes to the
American Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis) Brits’ greatest fear: “You see, Wanda, we’re
all terrified of embarrassment. That’s why we’re so … dead.” A Britain in which
warning about the plans of global jihadis to bring Dar al Islam to where Dar al
Harb used to be, can so embarrass one’s associates that they cringe, is a
Europe, which, because it cannot even identify the enemy, cannot figure out how
to fight back.

What
has this got to do with the two Jewish-Israeli responses with which I began
this discussion? Ironically, it suggests that those tribal Jews/Israelis that
Europe deplores are fighting not only for themselves, but for a decent
democratic and egalitarian culture the world over, against a deeply regressive,
triumphalist Islam. The “left-wing” Israeli responses that disdain tribalism,
and promote lofty universalist values, dismiss this Israeli tribal voice as
paranoid, conspiracy-minded, xenophobic, Islamophobic. Yet, in so doing, they
contribute to the cognitive disorientation of the outside nations and peoples.
In their eagerness to confess Israel’s sins, to consider Palestinians innocent
and Israel guilty, they shield outsiders from hearing the much harsher jihadi
voice that explicitly targets not just Israel but them.

The
foreign minister of Sweden or the head of the socialist party in the Netherlands shows just how powerfully this cognitive disorientation has
Europeans in its thrall. Responding to events in Paris, they did not make
reference to the problems in Sweden and Holland, all of them a function of
their own ever-more aggressive, triumphalist Muslim fringe. Instead they
invoked the contribution of Israel to
the frustration of Palestinian Muslims, apparently in the empirically
contradicted hope that dumping on Israel will improve rather than further
damage their own situation.

When
those who wish for peace are not prepared for war, not even cognitive war, when
they ignore the Roman dictum si vis pacem
para bellum, then they bring about a war they will lose. Bellum efficiunt, et pacem volentes.

Do we,
as Jews and Israelis, beneficiaries of, and contributors to, free and
democratic societies the world over, really want to contribute to the
catastrophic disorientation that now, astonishingly, rules the discourse of
free nations? Or are we ready to set aside, at least momentarily, our
universalist self-abnegation, and help people of good will everywhere
understand our plight, which is also
theirs?